Hispanica Incognita

Rough-cut Mexican restaurant Prehispanica still excels in places.

Just one block south of Tasty n Alder and
across from Saint Cupcake, at the dusty frontier of the past year’s
West End restaurant boom, lies something vanishingly rare in Portland:
an upscale-casual, family Mexican restaurant with aspirations beyond the
counter taqueria or hot-plate-don’t-touch platters laden with
salty-sweet enchilada sauce and soupy refrieds.

Prehispanica’s
interior is an airy and pleasant mix of white tablecloths, muted pink
and bright orange, with burnished-wood floors and a charmingly domestic
fondness for little butterflies as decorative elements. But from the
exterior it’s almost invisible, camouflaged into sidewalk brick and the
mottled gray of its building; almost no one I’ve asked seems to know
it’s there.

This
is a shame. While the restaurant is far from perfect, it’s a lovely
place to spend a lunch break or an early evening sipping a stiff
margarita oflime or mango
or grapefruit. The tomatillo salsa, served with fresh and fluffy
tortilla chips, is one of the best I’ve had here or elsewhere, with a
stems-and-all approach to cilantro that makes it almost resemble
chutney.

The
complimentary tortillas are thick and substantive, roughly granular in a
way one associates with hand grinding. And the servers are a particular
breed of friendly I’ve come to appreciate especially in the American
Southwest: smilingly indulgent, but always a little amused with your
existence, as if you’ve just asked for an extra piece of candy at
bedtime.

Prehispanica,
I should note, doesn’t actually serve Prehispanic cuisine. There’s
cheese from fresco to Cotija to Oaxacan, beef at whim. The cuisine seems
to range roughly from Veracruz around the horn of Mexico City and south
to Oaxaca. A particular strength is the dinnertime pescado empapelado
($17), a whitefish served tender and juicy in paper, with tomatillo and
mint, as well as a generously decadent bisteces rellenos ($11) stuffed
with a bacon-and-pork roulade. A thick, flavorful cream of poblano soup
with corn ($5) was enlivened by serranos.

Still,
the restaurant doesn’t seem to have garnered much business since it
opened in June, and on one visit this meant that the mussel appetizer
($8) and shrimp empanada ($5) did not weather the wait for a customer;
both smelled like a wharf. (The mushroom-poblano-oaxacan empanada fared
significantly better.) The Mexico City classic carne a la tampiquena
(Tampico steak, $18) was a bit tough of beef and gummy of cactus,
however delightful the accompanying plantains.

The
pollo en mole ($16) is its own beast entirely—one of the more intense
moles I’ve yet encountered; sharp and spicy and as dense as a tan tan
peanut sauce, with sesame sprinkled on top and notes so dark it’s almost
as if it contained soy. It is an ambitious dish with no small amount of
decadence, and I’m very affectionate toward it. But bite after bite
after bite, it still eludes me whether I like it.

The restaurant is probably best considered a work in progress, with some terrific highs and some perplexing disappointments.

But
aside from Amelia’s in Hillsboro or Loncheria Mitzil in Oregon City,
Prehispanica is a model of family restaurant much missed in these parts.
This is reason enough to wish it well.

Order this: Either of the pescado dishes for dinner, a relleno for lunch.

Best deal: A cheese empanada ($5) and black-bean or poblano soup ($5) is a full meal for dinner.

I’ll pass: The freshness problems of the shellfish need to be sorted out.